Might be a bad idea for me to go into this while having ptsd issues, especially when I'm probably about to do a long ass sleep, but yolo.
Basic synopsis on my feelings here:
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tl;dr: I used to believe we should be federated, but after 3ish years of interacting with lemmygrad on various accounts, I have noticed that lemmygrad is not a place that is safe for transgender people at large. The reason for this is principally their debatelord culture and refusing to comprehend that debating a point against a minority's lived experience, then demanding civility when that minority gets angry, is the same shit liberals do.
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I noticed instances of reactionary content, such as here and/or comments are not removed or users banned. Lemmygrad seems to prefer to debate reactionaries, and obviously subjecting minority groups to reactionary content for personal fun is callous at best, and reactionary at worst. Its important to make it so that there are designated areas for dunking on reactionary content, as well as nsfw and content tags to avoid it. Otherwise, reactionary comments should be removed and visible in a mod log.
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I discussed in this post why it is important to remove downvotes to protect trans people. After I noticed people were creating evasive comments to debate me, I pretty much told them to fuck off. This resulted in a ban from their admins and they continued to defend their policy. This reminds me a lot of the struggle sessions we used to have about adding pronouns to the site or removing downvotes. People would be evasive in this same way to give the benefit of the doubt then demand civility when people get angry. Those people are not allies and should be purged.
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The admins seem to have a principle misunderstanding of why minorities don't want to see any form of harassment or discrimination directed at them and how that is perpetuated across social media sites. They seem to legitimately believe that keeping downvotes means that they will be able to stave off reactionary content or is somehow a valuable tool in responding to reactionary content, when in reality they should be removing and banning reactionary content.
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Certain users were very keen on civility bullshit, particularly @simply_surprise@lemmygrad.ml, @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml (an admin), @davel@lemmygrad.ml. This is honestly the most disgusting behavior I've seen on lemmygrad, and the fact that the admins doubled down on it is fucked.
I can see staying federated to a bunch of very small instances, especially queer focused and hobby instances, but I'm pretty soured on the fediverse at this point.
I'm extremely disappointed in what I've seen of the lemmygrad mod team. Why are they making me into a splitter over such a basic issue of avoiding the harassment of trans people at a systemic level, bastards 
I am willing to retract this if the admins of lemmygrad self crit and apologize for temp bans or otherwise of my accounts on civility reasons and make it clear that debating the lived experience of anyone of a minority group is unacceptable going forward. There are positive and proactive ways of discussing someone's lived experience without going into debate territory and trying to find a technicality in lived experiences to support an opinion you already hold. I maintain that removing downvotes is a boon to trans users, if you can come up with something better than that and implement it, I am all ears.
No for defederation. You proceed to go on another instance (in a community that was for lemmygrad users only according to the sidebar), told them how they should do things, got banned, and now come to complain here. As other lemmygrad users rightfully pointed out, their site does not have the same history or culture as ours with regards to downvotes. As they also rightfully said, how would you react if lemmygrad users came here and told us to reinstate downvotes? It's fine to have a difference of opinion on matters as trivial as downvotes existing, it's a different instance. It's not hexbear 2.0. It will have different policies. They agree with us on 99% of things anyway, I'm pretty sure disagreeing about downvotes should not be a reason for defederation.
lemmygrad_court
This is a community for Lemmygrad users and admins to discuss administrative issues in a more transparent manner
This is bullshit. I could go into the specifics but the idea that a trans person can't go onto another instance to recommend trans positive changes to a website, when it affects THEIR community, is absurd. Like seriously, fuck off. Let alone the fact that I have interacted with lemmygrad for years now.
Yeah I don't get the argument that bad interactions on another instance aren't supportive of a reason to federate. That's the way defederation starts lol.
Though I do think Lemmygrad are comrades they just need to develop at their own pace.
Edit: transphobes of all types should be relentlessly bullied though. And you should be unbanned from Lemmygrad. I'm just remembering that hexbear required several struggle sessions to become trans positive and think Lemmygrad is actually in a better place than where we started, outside of that one mod.
Also I used this same argument with blahaj and at least many of the liberals there considered it. I was never banned there. Imagine being worse than liberals.
Truly embarrassing for Lemmygrad I agree. Sorry you went through that.
The whole idea of not allowing people from other instances (which doesn't even apply here since she is using her Lemmygrad account and is participating a Lemmygrad discussion as a 2 year member of Lemmygrad) goes against the spirit of federation. OP started a thread on Lemmygrad referencing a policy set by Hexbear, so why shouldn't a proponent from Hexbear who pushed hard for said policy appear in that Lemmygrad thread, using her 2 year old Lemmygrad account no less? This is not that much different from the losers at sh.itjust.works crying about Hexbear and complaining about Hexbear brigadarinosTM when people here give them a piece of our minds.
we have the den comm for hexbear users only. the community absolutely isn't the same post-federation and it makes sense to have a spot for community members to discuss the site and their lives without anyone from a federated comm butting in
I'm absolutely fine with trans people offering suggestions for the site to make the situation better
i agree but i think it's helpful to go in assuming that criticism perceived to be from outside the community isn't gonna be taken well. it's very rare to find a mod/admin team without at least one person who has a chip on their shoulder
Doesn't matter to me, that is liberal shit. A valid suggestion from a relevant party is good.
Debate shit, it is gross and is transphobic in that it does not allow people from all parts of the trans community to discuss. Especially terrible considering we are ideologically aligned and on the same platform.
A few things about this.
On the one hand:
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I agree with you on removing downvotes being a good change, especially for minorities, and I think the argument that "downvotes help hide transphobic rhetoric" is a "free marketplace of ideas"-adjacent argument that ironically relies on the majority to support the minority.
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I agree that the admin telling you "Actually, removing downvotes does not make it a better experience for trans people" does fall into "debatebroing a trans person's lived experience" territory and is definitely worth criticizing.
On the other hand I read through the thread and think I need to point out some things:
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You opened up with "we should do what hexbear does" and when someone disagreed, you immediately went to "So you think hexbear is platforming reactionary content?", which is needlessly hostile and turns the whole thing into a lemmygrad vs hexbear debate when it really shouldn't be.
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I disagree with calling this "civility fetishism". Civility fetishism is when people tell you to be calm while you're talking about hospitals being bombed in Gaza or when they tell you to be polite towards nazis, I don't think it's inappropriate to remain civil when talking about whether you should be able to downvote posts on lemmygrad dot ml. Civility is not inherently a bad thing, we only mock it when people tell us to be civil while arguing with people who actively want us dead.
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I think some people in that thread are right that you are too quick to assume bad faith from a group of people who, and I can't stress this enough, aren't your enemies. Lemmygrad and hexbear agree on 99% of issues and personally, I have seen very few shitty takes from them. I think this admin was being kind of a douche and a debatebro, but they're still an admin on an explicitly marxist-leninist site that is overwhelmingly more good than bad.
I think you had an incredibly uncomfortable and frustrating experience because you got dogpiled on and downvoted on lemmygrad and consequently talked yourself into a rage, which I can sympathize with, it's a terrible experience, I've been there. As you yourself said, you're probably not in the best mental state to argue about this right now. I would urge you to cool your head and try to review the discussion in good faith. Assume that other MLs aren't your enemies and they might just be wrong on this issue for normal reasons, not because they're actually a reactionary who wants to suppress minorities. Remember that a lot of people on hexbear also opposed the removal of downvotes before it happened.
Lemmygrad and hexbear agree on 99% of issues
This is the bottom line for me. If we can't get along with people we're aligned with this closely, we'll never get anything done.
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I read the points, seems clear that Lemmygrad does have less focus on being a purely safe space as Hexbear. But their users, when here, seem to always be on the level in my experience.
So I understand disliking the place, but I don't understanding how defederating helps address those concerns.
Agree just ban the stupid ones, theres some lemmygrad posters that have been cool and nice
Unfortunately, one of the stupid ones is an admin and is presumably backed up by other admins. If there were just two stupid non admins I would be ignoring this and reporting the trolls.
Well, my other thing on this too is that I've never once posted on lemmygrad to my knowledge, I dont look at it or care. I dont know any of their admins, users, opinions or drama nor any of the other instances. I only post here despite not liking everything and everyone.
Is it possible to just not go there?
As I explained before, I care more about making the best place possible for trans users. If theyre going to harbor trolls that try to bait you and then complain about civility, and are backed by admins, we shouldn't be federated. I'm honestly not even a big fan of lemm.ee or lemmy.ml, but I've yet to run into any issues from those mods and admins, maybe I will. Same reason we should be defederated with obvious conservative and liberal instances.
And I really want there to be a unified trans community that is safe and have all the queer spaces linked, but the admins of various instances love making that as hard as possible if you have any strong opinions about how chasers and harassers should be purged and hedged off before they can make trouble.
Am I explaining it well enough? If not, sorry, ptsd issues still, maybe I can reword it later. PTSD makes it harder for me to string a long complex thought together, more of short bursts.
Sorry seeing this just now, yes that sounds fair. But I think if you want that, I think the argument to keep Hexbear unfederated is much stronger. We cant control everyone elses instance. Also we keep out potential allies.
I'm also saying this as someone who doesnt venture outside of Hexbear at all. So a little bit of devils advocate but I also agree with you.
Maybe a statement of condemnation from our mods would bring attention to the issue for some of their users. Defederating is the nuclear option and surely there are other steps we can take first?
I would agree, this is mostly a call for more dialogue about this. I think its a serious issue.
The issue is the admins. Afaik if they ban people, you can't see them here from the side of lemmygrad. This means they can over time ban any trans people that they think are too aggressive by their absurd civility rule (re: people can just troll trans people and when the trans people get angry, you ban the trans people) and have likely cut off a critical source of info for trans users in their instance. I'm of the opinion of forcing people to choose the option that is not shit by defederating, if they choose to not fix this dogshit rule. You also don't know if you're on their shitlist because from what I can tell their modlog is not public.
I personally don't agree, if only for the fact that grad has turned out to be the only actually left-wing instance besides our own.
Also, as others have mentioned, the people from the grad who have started hanging out with us here are cool, the ones who may not like our site culture don't come over here to start shit. If that starts happening at some point I'm absolutely open to changing my mind of course.
Sort by local and all you'll see from the grad are the friendly folk.
The issue is I don't like the fact that if a post shows up on our all feed, and they ban one of our trans users from their users being a debatelord, then their 29% of their website that is trans no longer will see trans positive content that user produces. This creates a potential spiral over time that hurts the trans community overall between all communities. And this is something I'm concerned with with lemmy.ml and even blahaj too and I'm constantly thinking of a way to fix it up better, I really feel like the federation concept has only served to split the queer community and theres got to be some way to fix it.
Hope I explained well.
You've made your points perfectly well and I don't necessarily disagree with any of them except the call for defederation.
Yeah I would like a discussion but I don't know how amenable they are to that
I don't have any bright ideas on how to fix this unfortunately (I am a dumbass after all), but I will say that it sucks seeing you in such a bad mood and I hope it all works out eventually.
While I think your criticisms were basically correct and the ban was bullshit, I don't think this rises to the level of defederation for me. The systems and culture we've developed here are a unique combination of circumstance and deliberate policy. I myself argued against downvote removal all those years ago. A lot of people did. If it had just been put to a popular vote, I doubt it would have ever passed.
Looking back now, history has fully vindicated the mods. Getting rid of downvotes not only had the intended effect of helping to create a safe space for marginalized comrades, but has had so many beneficial, consequential secondary order effects that it's difficult, ironically, to imagine the site with downvotes at all.
So while I think your arguments to the 'Gradders were correct, I can't really blame them for not being able to take your criticisms on board because we ourselves found a path forward by fumbling forward together. They are Lemmygrad, not Hexbear, and they deserve our pity for that
If we're gonna defed from Lemmygrad, just turn the whole damn thing off and throw the federation experiment in the trash.
Its kinda how I feel. I do wanna collect some of the small innocent queer instances and stuff though. If there is ever a way to get certain communities piecemeal I'd jump at it so we could poach all the trans stuff from everywhere else and let their subscribers post here.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Make this a normal website again and not some hyper-Reddit freakshow.
I feel like this isn't enough to warrant a defederation? Like, yeah I get that debating reactionaries and the like isn't something a decent chunk of people want to do, but that would be confined to Lemmygrad spaces. It's still not an issue in Hexbear proper. And there's been lots of great people interacting here from Lemmygrad. I don't think we should defederate.
I think most of what you say is at minimum valid points of concern and critique for lemmygrad, but none of it rises to the level of defederation making sense.
If you want to change a community, especially one that you only have limited involvement in, it's very important to be patient and to understand where the people more involved in the community are coming from (no investigation etc).
If you aren't up to that because it involves suffering through a certain level of bullshit (and it does), that's totally fine, but it's more a reason for you to stay off of grad than for us to defederate.
Dune fox boy has an attitude problem and I think that's concerning, but even as we seek for him to fix it, we need to understand that he has been one of the main admins of grad for a long time and been dealing with liberal bullshit from federated communities for a long time and his excessive defensiveness (and it is excessive) does not merely come from a fundamental evil in his soul nor does it mean we should flatly condemn him instead of work with him to improve.
We are all humans here, and I think that the people on lemmygrad (even Dune boy) have demonstrated that they want for things to be better than they are, so it is worth suffering their weak points just as they suffer ours so we can both try to help each other improve. Not everyone in each group will necessarily be up to that, but they can just stay in their own circles because each group respecting the other's rules is a reasonable baseline expectation that is already enforced.
Edit: banning you was incorrect and Dune boy should apologize for that one, imo. Banning someone to get them to disengage when the interactions are negative is valid, but that doesn't seem to be the given reason nor would it have been timed very well if it was. You were treated with a lack of respect and benefit of the doubt that you should have been given as a relative pillar of a sister community and that's not okay.
I went and read the thread that no doubt spawned this one and a few things.
First everything you said on grad is correct.
Second they can't come here and do that shit because they will be banned, admin or not.
Third I'm not sure I understand how defederation solves anything. Historically we have defederated because their users were coming into Hexbear and harassing our users or posting shit content to a degree that the our modmins couldn't or shouldn't deal with. Is that happening with grad? If it is, okay then yeah probably defed. I haven't seen it (on Hexbear at least... again you're spot on that the kind of debatelord "respect bad views" shit is happening on grad.) Maybe it is happening here too and our mods are just so powerful that none of us ever see the bad shit. But if they aren't coming here and stirring up shit...then just don't go to their comms? You can just go local only and that solves the immediate harm they're doing to you and other trans comrades in the site. Defederation doesn't remove them from the Internet they'll still be over there with their shit takes. You just won't see them unless you choose to go and engage them... which is exactly the same as just browsing local only or not subscribing to any grad comms.
If the root issue here is "Hexbear should not be federated with any instance that does not have a 1:1 ideological alignment with Hexbear" then that's a different discussion and one that's probably interesting to have but one that would necessarily result in Hexbear just completely defederating from everyone because there is no community on the fediverse that does a better job protecting minority comrades than Hexbear. Maybe that's a discussion worth having again.
I get your point. I'm probably not in the best state of mind to argue or suggest, but other than what I have already said, I would like to posit the idea that by staying federated (assuming the admins do not respond or resolve the issue) we are associating ourselves with communists that support banning trans people for "incivility". We are selectively federated to many things, why would we selectively choose to associate with people that make our own ideas look bad?
Thanks for your input though
we are associating ourselves with communists that support banning trans people for "incivility"
This part I do also agree with you that their mods should take a better stance on. Being transphobic is uncivil no matter how nice the window dressing they put on it is, so it would be nice to see their "be civil" rules applied equally here. And that might even be enough to address much of your issue too; if the transphobes get banned for their "civil" transphobia then job done. They say they're doing this but in your experience they aren't, and I'm more willing to believe your experience on that than what they're saying.
So hopefully their admin team sees all this and agrees that they need to do better.
I hope the sleep helps, comrade.
I don't think the issues you present here are worth defederation with an otherwise staunchly communist and anti-transphobic instance. I don't agree with their policy on comment voting and I would like them to commit to being proactive about removing transphobia, but allowing a dimbulb reactionary to babble on about stuff they don't understand isn't that serious, and in that first example you linked, I think you should practice recognizing when an online interaction is more emotionally draining than edifying, and disengaging when that's the case.
I simply don't think they're staunch anything if this is their reaction to what was originally a friendly suggestion.
also i havent slept
Maybe you're right and I just haven't interacted with them enough. I'll keep a closer eye, personally.
One thing I see repeatedly in that removing downvotes thread is justifying bad decisions as accommodations for burned out users. It's very silly, and somewhere between liberalism and skill issue.
Hot-Take coming!
spoiler
"if you are so burnt-out you can't just type 'terrible take' or 'bad take' or 'g t f o' and you NEED the one-click-solution,,, it may be time to touch grass, come back and laugh at all the great dunks others (more capable posters) made". As I was typing this I realize again how great it is we don't have downer-arrows.
I can't speak from the trans experience, so it's possible problems were there that were invisible to me, but I thought that Lemmygrad (or communism.lemmy.ml initially) had a fantastic community three or four years ago and I actually preferred it to chapo.chat. The effortposts and friendly community did a lot to bring me further left. The site became horribly toxic overnight the second genzedong got banned from reddit. I ended up giving up on it about a month afterwards and haven't logged in since.
I did generally like it, particularly the trans community on there, but its incredibly disappointing how its evolved over time for sure. Maybe I was just more blind to these issues before, or maybe I'm actually asking people to be more inclusive of trans people and that makes them angry, rather than just talking about trans stuff. I don't know.
Not disputing any points but the vast majority of users on lemmygrad in my experience are true comrades and are very useful in the other instances as backup, they make it harder to accuse hexbears of being a weird abberant view because you see organic agreement from other instances in a heated discussion. It would be a shame to lose all of them because of some debatelords. In my opinion.
